Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House

by K. M. Frontain

  “Is that what he did?” Intana muttered.

  Halva nodded earnestly. “He did,” he said, and to me added, “Your slave came by, Lord.”

  “My slave?”

  “His slave?” Intana said, his tone sharp. I ignored him as Halva replied.

  “The former chamberlain of Imperial Court. He said he’s found a suitable place for you, but I wouldn’t let the crew go until you were ready. I did send my trusted first mate to do a scout, though.”

  This time I refrained from smiling. Apparently, I had become a lord without significant duties, while Halva had earned the rank of resourceful captain. Well, then. I supposed I could train him as a sailor eventually, since he needed the experience to go with the position he had claimed. “And what did your trusted first mate report?”

  “It’s a right good place, Lord.”

  “Very well. We’ll relocate in the morning. See to pleasing Yrrylos with a monetary settlement. I must see after Intana.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Another slave? I’m not enough?” Intana hissed at me.

  Sighing wearily, I took him by the wrist and led him off to the back stairs, down to a hidden courtyard within Yrrylos’s establishment. Here she had a garden of citrus trees, magnolias and rhododendron, and in the centre of the crowded expanse, a pool with a fountain and statuary. Intana and I muddied the water bathing him beneath the moonlight.

  An orange tree was in blossom. Its perfume inundated the courtyard whenever the night breeze did not gust sea air past the rooftop. Springtime in Verdant, a blessed season, but I reclined in a pool with a creature who could have been born of the radiance cast down from the heavens and could not observe his beauty with unguarded eyes. The moment was imperfect.

  A girl came out not long after we’d seated ourselves in the pool and brought scented soaps and oils. Another came with towels, and yet one more with cream soap for washing Intana’s hair.

  For a god who had fussed so much about women earlier, he became an utter pig for luxury then. He lolled in their company. He lazed back and let them do as they pleased, and I, after only managing to clean a single arm, moved aside.

  I didn’t resent the intrusion. Truly. I understood their need: to touch their god’s creation, this exquisite divine son. So few women had been given the opportunity. I only felt a little perturbed when they combed straight his hair.

  But it was just as well, really. Once the grime of a mountain had swirled away, only beautiful Intana lay beneath, and I had to look away for fear of seeing the ether dragon lurking outside the real. When I discovered his two grey cloths sunk at the bottom of the pool near my legs, I smiled and fished them out. I took satisfaction in laundering these and listened to the girls whisper and admire Intana.

  “So,” I murmured, sliding a silver chain through my fingers. “How was your progress on the first tunnel?”

  “Oh, please!” he cried. “Must you ruin this?”

  I grinned at the water. He deserved having it ruined. He’d ruined a fine dessert for me earlier that day. “They felt good after a few seconds, those chilled berries on my better parts.”

  He laughed, and then I laughed.

  “It was you who sent me away so that I could not eat them,” he accused.

  “But you did insist on being difficult. As you can see, I have more manners than you.”

  He loosed a rude sound, and I, smiling, rose up and took the pair of grey cloths out of the pool to hang them from their chains on the limb of an orange tree.

  “Where is Vaal?” he called to me.

  “I have no idea. I have discovered he is partial to any shadow, in water or out. He’ll be wherever there is one.”

  “Under your balls, then,” Intana answered.

  I laughed and returned to sit on the edge of the pool near him and the women. I watched the play of silver in the water’s image, the limbs of brown skin moving, the paleness of his back eclipsed and then shining again. The women had grown hushed since we’d begun speaking. I thought I should leave Intana alone with them.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll enjoy them. But not if you leave.”

  “From the way you behaved, I thought you entirely indisposed to women.”

  “I was only angry with you.”

  And did he lie so easily when angry? Or did he spill truths?

  Whether I could trust his words now, when we endured a pleasant calm moment, mattered little. Our situation remained unchanged. He was chained to me and I to him, and storms were certain to come in and send unpleasant waves crashing into our little harbour again. Vaal had named him erratic, and I thought Vaal right, because I felt no anger from Intana just then, and therefore no taint of resentment or hatred either. But he’d brought both feelings with him from the mountains only minutes ago.

  “Please, Haru,” he begged.

  I was thinking too clearly. I endeavoured to hush my worried musings.

  “Shh. Enjoy the women,” I said. “I will contemplate the moonlight next to your skin.”

  “Come in with me,” he pleaded.

  Before I could say anything, the girls stood and retreated from the water, skirts drenched, slender feet shining with liquid. They took with them the soaps, but left the oils and towels. They departed as they had come, without words.

  Ah. Never to know if he truly enjoyed women or not. One truth kept its veil.

  A little sadly, I called him out to sit on the edge of the pool with me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I’ll oil your skin,” I offered.

  He came to me, a length of white and silver. The highlights of blue had become a delicate blush in the moonlight. Dripping and smelling of perfume, he sank down at my side on the marble bench, which formed the rim of the pool. I took a towel and rubbed the moisture from his back, lifting his long hair away to do so. He took another to dry his legs and arms.

  “I like the oil with the orange fruit scent,” he murmured. My lips twitched upward. So very definite, his opinion. Surely he had been oiled countless times before, by many Oradhé before me.

  “Orange scented, then.” I reached into the basket to fetch out the one with a curl of dried orange peel attached artfully to the neck of the bottle. The peel rested within a sprig of herbs. I uncorked the bottle and smelled the contents. I shut my eyes and smiled. “Mmm.”

  “Very mmm,” Intana agreed. He nudged me with a shoulder, must have realized I was still wet, because he draped a towel over my shoulders. “You’re going to make yourself ill. It’s cool tonight. I’m surprised you lasted so long. The girls grew chill bumps.”

  Oh. So that was the reason they’d scattered so suddenly. Our speaking must have been a good excuse for them to depart. “I don’t feel the cold,” I murmured. I poured some oil onto my palm.

  “You don’t? Ah. It’s because you’re a seafarer. You’re accustomed to feeling a chill.”

  I said nothing. I would have let him believe the assumption, but my thoughts seemed as clear as the moonlight this evening.

  “Why don’t you feel the chill, Haru?” Intana asked, and his tone had gone hard.

  “I’ve acquired some of Vaal’s immunity to it,” I said. “Here. Bend forward a bit and I’ll do your back.”

  He didn’t move for a moment, then shifted to present his back.

  “Pull your hair forward, please,” I directed.

  Again he did not move.

  “Intana,” I said softly. “Let me touch you.”

  There came the slightest of motions, as if a shiver had gone up his spine, and then his hand reached back to tug the wet mass around the nape of his neck. Watching him do this, heat shot hard from my centre. Opalescent nails, slender fingers. I looked at the neck he’d exposed, then the ear. I blinked in surprise. He had the most delicate point at the top. How had I missed that?

  “You never look at me!” he cried. “Oil me, damn it!”

  “Yes. Sorry.” I’d let most of the oil drip onto my lap. I poured more and smeared it ov
er his spine, spread it to either flank, and up and down from neck to bottom. Watched in fascination a stray bead funnel down the crease of his buttocks. “If you kneel in front of me, I’ll rub your shoulders.”

  I said it and couldn’t believe my voice had sounded normal. He moved without a word, knelt between my knees with his back to me. I dropped more oil onto my lap, staring fixedly at him, and for once, lust blinded any other vision I might have had.

  “Haru!” he prodded. “My shoulders and arms are sore!”

  I set the flask down and gripped his shoulders. He made a pleased noise within seconds and leant forward loosely to let me massage the oil into his neck.

  “Oh! You’re good at this.” A momentary stiffness ensued. Then his body relaxed again. “From whom did you learn this?” he asked. His tone was pleasantly curious, but I knew better.

  “My mother.”

  He laughed, caught, jealous over a phantom that hadn’t existed. Before him and Vaal, there hadn’t been a man other than Jumi. I had learned this art from a woman with no designs upon my body, other than to bully me into fathering more and more of her grandchildren. Since I hadn’t minded the task of making grandchildren for my mother, I had let her bully me as often as she liked. The women with whom I had contracted for paternity had appreciated my gift for soothing the pains and fatigue of the body. I had never used the skill on a man before Intana, perhaps knowing, somehow, I would endanger any that received such intimate attention.

  But I had leave to devote the practice to Intana’s body. Creation, but he felt good beneath my palms. “Here. Just turn a little so I can work your arm,” I murmured.

  He angled his torso. I stared at his flank, at the play of flesh over ribs, the curve of narrow hips, and I worked the muscles of his arms without thinking. After a few minutes, his arm slipped from my grasp, his body rippled in the other direction, and he offered me his other side. I continued my ministrations, more oil, more heat shooting from my centre, a weight of moonlight seeming to come down on me from all sides.

  Solidity. Sinuous curves. A sheen of growing silver.

  Look away, Haru.

  Vaal! I shut my eyes and shivered, for the first time cold since I had entered the garden, not from the chill of the air, but because I had almost called an ether dragon down into Yrrylos’s small courtyard.

  It was bad. I could still see the shape, the luminous silver, the presence at once solid and yet light as air. My mind was filling with Intana, and the more his truth suffused my perception, the more I lost my grip on his human shape. Expansion, inevitable expansion.

  Touch him, Vaal whispered. Touch him and think only of the heat in your centre.

  “Haru?” Intana said. “Why did you stop?”

  Stop what? The motions of my hands, or the release of your true nature? “A moment. I need more oil.”

  I fumbled for the bottle, managed to catch it and not drop it despite my slippery grip. I heard him move, felt the motion of his body as he turned. His palms settled on my knees. Shock of heat. Spike of aggravation rushing out from his touch, up my flanks and into my heart. The organ stuttered, once, twice.

  “Your eyes are shut.”

  “The moonlight blinds me.”

  He kissed me, his lips hard, his resentment restored, but his teeth didn’t cut my flesh. He knew, somewhere in these shadows, Vaal watched.

  I dropped the bottle after all. The contents spilled onto my lap. I heard the glass tinkle on stone and roll off, unbroken. Intana mewled a frustrated sound and jerked me from the marble seat. We knelt on the garden path, our fronts crushed together, and then Intana moved me against his crotch.

  The heat. His tingling, mine a slow burn. Our shafts rubbed together, and I uttered the sounds I could never hold back. Intana answered with a low groan. His tongue went into my mouth, plundered, fanned the heat in my centre, flared it up my legs and arms, curled it into my extremities.

  His mouth left me. I tried to follow, but he wove away, parted enough to put his hands between us.

  “Oh!” I gasped. His hands, the exquisite crush of our shafts, riding up and down in his grip.

  “Look at them together,” he whispered.

  I dared to raise my eyelids, to gaze at where the heat flared outward. Sheen of oil, his white and silver torso, my brown one, our shafts hard together, the heads clamped side by side; the cobalt of his muted to greyish blue, mine a dark shadow in the moonlight; distended, disappearing, reappearing. I breathed inward, strained to keep quiet.

  “Make your noises, beautiful Haru,” he whispered. “Make them. It pleases me to hear you cry.”

  The heat became a flash that exploded through me. If I made noises, I didn’t hear them. My heart pounded too loudly. I pumped into Intana’s grip, my hands tight on the stone bench to the rear, my arms almost painfully stiff as they supported me. Mindless, no large image of coiling silver, only his feel and his grip and the shock of his seed hitting my torso.

  The tingling! It was almost intolerable.

  I remembered Vaal saying that Intana didn’t want me with him. Intana’s seed, his power, his ardour, his resentment, his need to be free, all there on my belly. Such a mix of feelings, and not the most pleasant.

  “How much do you hate me?” I whispered.

  He looked up into my eyes, startled. “How can you ask that?”

  “How can I not?”

  “I don’t hate you!”

  “Did you hate every Oradhé before me as well?”

  His clasp loosened. His hands retreated. I shifted from the stone bench and crouched in an almost defeated slump before him. The tingling on my stomach became all the more excruciating.

  “Why do you torment me with these questions?” he asked.

  I struck him. He stared at me in shock, my hand imprinted on his cheek. “I’m a pilot fish!” I spat. “I pick the carrion out from a predator’s teeth! And you’ve left in yours the souls of countless men that have loved you for naught!” I lurched upright. “Go to the mountain and continue your task!”

  “Haru! No!” he wailed. “It’s not true!”

  “Go!”

  He snatched his meagre garment from the tree and went, and I returned to the stone seat and wept, almost desperately washing Intana’s essence from my skin. But I could still feel it there. The power had sunk in. He didn’t want me. Beneath the slavery lay a constant urge to wrest free, a constant hate of that which kept him bound, his Oradhé. Me.

  Vaal didn’t come to me, and I was grateful, because I mistrusted him as well in that moment. Even so, I heard his voice.

  One doesn’t ask a pilot fish to pick one’s teeth. One waits for him to come swimming over of his own accord.

  I loosed a choked laugh. Damn him. He was wiser than all my expectations. I’d been stupid and taken him only for a shark. But as he’d already indicated, he hadn’t destroyed all the life in the seas. Apparently, even the epitome of destruction can be a shrewd and gentle ruler.

  When he’s not hungry, Vaal amended.

  I laughed again. After a minute, I rose up and returned within, determined to keep my distance from Intana long enough to gain a sense of perspective that wasn’t partly his.

  ***

  The ‘right good place’ Imperial Court’s former chamberlain had prepared was a villa on the eastern flank of the harbour slope, not so high as the palace and temple, but definitely in the rich quarter. The villa had grounds, and by this I mean vast tracks of greenery unspoiled by construction or roads. I was at a loss to understand how my ‘new slave’ had acquired the residence, and since he was not present when I relocated, I wandered the property without knowing the circumstances behind getting it.

  “Halva?” I called.

  Earlier, he’d scampered into a huge library to goggle at the shelves lined with butterfly collections, scrolls and bound books. I had continued on alone to make my inspection, but returned to the expansive reception hall, reluctant to stay within the building.

  “Yes, Lord?” Ha
lva popped into the library entrance and looked expectantly at me. I glanced at his fingers, noted the iridescent sheen on his thumbs and forefingers, tried not to think how much damage he’d done to the collections.

  “Why wasn’t Jemoni here to receive us?”

  “Um… Ah, yes! He said he would see about advising the remaining nobility about their conduct toward you and Vaal. I suppose they’re taking up his time still. A good bunch were following him yesterday, haranguing him to intercede with you.”

  “Did you ask him how he acquired this domicile?”

  “No, Lord. Does it matter?”

  “No, I suppose not. Halva, you do understand that it may take you years to replace some of the butterfly specimens you’ve ruined?”

  Halva blinked and began to flush with mortification. “Uh… How did you know?”

  “Look at your fingers.”

  “Oh.” He gave me a sheepish grin and hid his hands behind his back. “My father would have walloped me first and spoken after,” he said. His grin crumbled. “If he bothered to speak at all.”

  “One does not wallop a man for damaging a small amount of property,” I said. “One merely reminds him he is responsible for its repair or replacement.”

  “Oh.” The smile returned to his face, and his hands came forward. He looked at the evidence of his poor behaviour and smiled all the wider. “A man,” he whispered. “I forgot about that.”

  “What happened to your parents exactly, Halva?” I asked. “Are they dead?”

  “No. My father is one of the unwashed,” Halva said. “Not a man. He never swam beneath the dome because he couldn’t afford the ceremony. He can only take work that true men will not. Two years ago, he threw me from the house when my mother bore another brother. He said he couldn’t afford to keep me any longer.”

  Thrown out to starve? While his family lived on?

  The hypocrisy of this society. I hadn’t understood this facet of the Ardu faith, that men without sufficient funds were deprived of their manhood ceremony and, thereby, denied the right to gainful employment.